Hesai Gr (NASDAQ:HSAI) released second-quarter financial results and hosted an earnings call on Tuesday. Read the complete transcript below.

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Summary

Hesai Gr reported second-quarter 2026 revenues of RMB 861 million, marking a 22% increase year-over-year, with a gross margin of 40% and a GAAP net income of RMB 71 million, up 60% year-over-year.

The company is expanding into a full-stack infrastructure platform for robotics and physical AI, comprising three layers: See (LiDAR), Understand (Cosmo), and Act (actuation modules).

LiDAR shipments reached over 628,000 units, an increase of nearly 80% year-over-year, with strong demand in both the ADAS and robotics markets.

Strategic Growth Initiatives (SGI) began contributing to revenues, with Q2 SGI revenues at RMB 45 million, and the company raised its full-year SGI revenue guidance to RMB 200-300 million.

Future outlook is positive, with Q3 revenue expected to be between RMB 1.1 to 1.15 billion, and full-year LiDAR shipments are projected to be 3 to 3.5 million units.

Management highlighted strategic collaborations and design wins with major global automakers and robotics companies, positioning Hesai Gr for significant growth in the robotics and physical AI sectors.

Full Transcript

OPERATOR

Hello ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Hesai Gr's second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. Please note that today's conference call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to our first speaker today, Yong Ting Shi, the company's Head of Capital Markets.

Please go ahead.

Yong Ting Shi, Head of Capital Markets

Hello everyone. Thank you for joining Hesai Gr's second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Our earnings release is now available on our IR website at investor.hisaytech.com as well as via newswire services. Today you will hear from our CEO, Dr. David Lee, who will provide an overview of our recent updates. Next, our CFO, Mr. Andrew Fan, will address our financial results before we open the call for questions. Before we continue, I refer you to the safe harbor statement in our earnings press release, which applies to this call as we will make forward-looking statements.

Please also note that the company will discuss non-GAAP measures today, which are more thoroughly explained and reconciled to the most comparable measures reported under GAAP in our earnings release and SEC filings. With that, I'm pleased to turn over the call to our CEO, Dr. David Lee. David, please go ahead.

Dr. David Lee, CEO

Thank you. Yongting, hello everyone. Thanks for joining us. Let me start with the headline: the second quarter of 2026 marks a major turning point for us; we are opening a truly exciting new chapter in our history. Over the past decade we have built the technology, manufacturing, engine and commercial scale required to lead the LiDAR industry. Today we are setting our sights on a much larger opportunity, expanding Hesai Gr into a full-stack infrastructure platform for robotics and physical AI, empowering them to see, understand and act.

The simplest way to think about Hesai Gr now is three layers. First, See: our LiDAR lets intelligent machines see the physical world — what things are, where they are, how fast they are moving and how the scene changes around them. Second, Understand: Cosmo turns real environments into reusable, AI-ready 3D spatial assets, so intelligent machines learn from the world instead of guessing at it. Third, Act: our robotic actuation modules turn intelligence into precise physical motions.

We are already seeing commercial momentum across all these layers. Our core LiDAR business keeps scaling profitably and generating strong cash flow. Cosmo shipped prototypes in July 2026, secured initial orders and remains on track to contribute revenues in the third quarter of 2026. Actuation modules started generating revenues in the second quarter of 2026 and are ramping fast. Together, these three layers form an integrated platform, opening up a significantly larger addressable market than we saw a year ago.

Let me start with See. ADAS was our first big commercialization market, and it's still a phenomenal cash engine. Think about it. A modern intelligent car is arguably the most widely deployed robot on earth, and the industry has moved beyond the question of can the car drive itself. The question now is whether it can do it safely every single time with backup. When something fails, that's a completely different bar. Regulation is catching up fast.

In China, the first mandatory national safety standards for Level 3 and Level 4 will take effect in 2027. In the U.S., proposed New Jersey legislation would require commercial autonomous vehicles to run two independent sensing technologies beyond cameras, typically LiDAR and radar, so the vehicle still sees when the cameras don't. This is what we have been saying for years. LiDAR is the invisible airbag. You never think about your airbag on a normal drive, but the one time you need it, it is the difference between a bad day and a catastrophe.

And nobody removes airbags to save bucks. So the market is shifting from does it have LiDAR? to better LiDAR and more LiDAR. Better means longer range, higher resolution, rock-solid reliability where it matters. This quarter we won a design win with Great Wall Motor for mass production programs using our ultra-long-range high-end ETX LiDAR with SOP expected in late 2026. ETX extends detection range to more than twice that of ATX. While ATX has already established itself as the benchmark for cost-efficient LiDAR, more means multi-LiDAR, full coverage and higher redundancy.

Momentum on our FTX blind-spot LiDAR is strong. Changan and other leading OEMs picked Hesai for multi-LiDAR programs, and Li Auto's L8 and L9, each equipped with four Hesai LiDARs, are now in mass production. Li Auto's newly launched L6 model, priced around RMB 250,000, now offers an optional four-LiDAR configuration. Four LiDARs at a mainstream price point — that is the moment an advanced feature goes mass market, and that is how content per vehicle compounds.

Globally, we are accelerating too. Following Mercedes-Benz, we won a major design win with Volkswagen covering multiple models from its China joint venture brands and expanded collaboration with GAC Toyota. We are also riding along with Chinese automakers that are going global, with meaningful overseas volume expected in 2027. Our leadership is also reflected in third-party market data. Per Gasgoo, we took 44% of China's long-range ADAS LiDAR market in June 2026 and have been number one in China for the long-range ADAS LiDAR market for 17 straight months.

Now here is where it gets fun. That same demand for high-performance 3D sensing is expanding rapidly into humanoids and other intelligent machines. Morgan Stanley estimates that robots could deploy roughly six times as many LiDAR sensors as automotive by 2050. You can only drive one car at a time, but in the future you might interact with many different robots in a day. We are already leading this trend. We work with more than 50 embodied AI companies worldwide, with recent orders coming from Unitree, Robbiant, Galbot, Galaxia, Dexmo and many others.

Our JT128 has become the go-to LiDAR for humanoid and quadruped robots, and the numbers are frankly remarkable. Robotics LiDAR shipments in the second quarter almost tripled compared with the same quarter last year, following year-over-year growth of 47% in 2023, 67% in 2024 and 426% in 2025, and we expect another two to three times shipment increase in full year 2026. The next leap is going from geometry to meaning. Classic LiDAR gives you the skeleton of the world — distance, shape and position.

A robot needs to know what a thing is, not just where it is. That is Picasso, our full-color ultra-sensitive 6D spat SoC. People love to frame the debate as camera versus LiDAR. That is like asking a human to choose between color and depth. You need both. Picasso fuses them on one chip. We are pleased to share that the Picasso SoC is now SOP-ready. Since its launch in April 2026, the full‑color ETX powered by Picasso has secured initial design wins, including Cargobot. It is now undergoing customer validation and advancing into RFI and RFQ discussions with leading robotaxi operators and global automakers. Because depth and color come off one chip under one timestamp, you get intrinsically time‑aligned multimodal information, exactly the fuel world models need.

We believe Picasso will be the eyes of the next generation of robots. Then layer two: Understand — helping robots understand and learn from their environments. This is where Cosmo comes in. Cosmo is a spatial intelligence platform that integrates an AI spatial camera, AI algorithms, 3D spatial assets, and cloud services into one unified system for capturing, reconstructing, and understanding the physical world. It addresses the sim‑to‑real gap bottleneck.

Robots need enormous digital representations of the physical world that are geometrically accurate and physically grounded. Training on bad inputs is like teaching a kid from a blurry textbook. Plenty of pages, but they may learn the wrong things. Cosmo makes the textbook sharp. It turns real environments into high‑fidelity, editable, interactive 3D assets — reality itself as the training ground. That is exactly the foundation robotic scaling laws need, without the model collapse risk from low‑quality inputs.

Validation came fast. Prototypes went out this July and within seven days we had orders from a lineup of leading humanoid robotics companies, including Galbot. Customer feedback has been extremely encouraging. Cosmo reconstructs a 200‑square‑meter restaurant at roughly five times the efficiency of a leading alternative, with such high fidelity that even 4‑millimeter text on a menu remains clearly visible. Scale that across thousands of scenes and you get the generalization robots need to walk into an actual home.

Cosmo also goes well beyond robotics: cultural tourism, film and TV, games, advertising, and beyond. Imagine standing on stage at a concert or on the field for a historic sporting moment. Cosmo turns real places into reusable digital assets. Since the April preview this year, more than 200 prospective partners have come to us and initial revenues are expected to land in the third quarter within SGI. But the part which I am most excited about is the business model of Cosmo.

The AI spatial camera is the front door. Behind it sits proprietary algorithms, cloud services, and a compounding library of 3D spatial assets. Every deployment adds assets. A richer library enables more applications. More applications attract more users. More users create more assets. That is a flywheel. Recurring revenues, network effects, and real operating leverage. Cosmo doesn't digitize a space once — it compounds the value of that space over time.

Layer three is Act — the muscles. J.P. Morgan sees 2026 as a milestone year for humanoids. Actuation modules can be more than half a robot's BOM, and one robot may need more than 100 modules. Run that math and long‑term demand could approach a trillion units — a trillion. It is also brutally hard engineering. You need strength and precision in something compact, efficient, durable, and consistent — like asking a pro athlete to run a marathon every day for years without losing a step.

This is exactly our wheelhouse. For more than a decade we have built precision electromechanical systems in‑house: chips, material science, thermal engineering, and automated manufacturing. People think lidar is a sensor, but it is not. It is a precision machine where optics, electronics, software, motors, and encoders stay in perfect sync through heat, cold, and vibration for years. The physics of a lidar scanner and a robot joint are cousins. Both demand precise control of position, speed, and force. Going from helping robots see to helping robots move is the most natural extension we have ever made. We rebuilt the entire actuation stack from first principles — materials, structure, and system integration. The result is a breakthrough in actuation modules: roughly three times the torque density and power density of leading products available today in a package 37% smaller, with transmission efficiency above 95% and performance validated through 2 million operating cycles.

We deliberately started with the hardest system in humanoid robotics — the dexterous hand. Walking gets a robot to the workstation. Hands are what make it useful once it arrives. Starting with this demanding hand application allowed us to validate our architecture at the highest level before extending it across the rest of the body. That strategy is already converting into revenues. We are supplying actuation modules to Sharpa, a global frontrunner in AI robotics.

In August 2026 in Shanghai at a Dairy Queen store, a Sharpa humanoid is expected to complete what we believe is the world's first zero‑retrofit commercial deployment of its kind. The robot is set to autonomously work a full DQ shift, preparing signature Blizzard ice cream treats — a complex, long‑horizon challenge — while demonstrating the potential to generalize across diverse real‑world tasks. That is the whole point. Robotics is not about impressive lab demos.

It is about useful work done repeatedly and reliably in a real operating environment. And as Sharpa earns market recognition and its backlog grows, our volume grows with it. At the same time, real‑world field experience feeds directly back into engineering, creating another powerful flywheel for our product development. Our dedicated production line is fully operational. Cumulative shipments exceeded 10,000 modules by the end of the second quarter.

We are ramping toward roughly 10,000 modules per month in the near term and expect six‑digit volumes in 2027. Meanwhile, full‑body modules' SOP is expected in the second half of 2026, expanding into shoulder and wrist joints. Beyond robotics, these modules fit anything needing dense, precise, reliable motion. This is only the beginning. As intelligent machines proliferate across industries, we believe the addressable market for high‑performance actuation will expand dramatically.

Let me close by returning to the bigger transformation we are witnessing today. If digital AI gave machines a voice and a mind, physical AI is giving them eyes to see, a body to move, and the ability to act in the real world. Hesai Gr is becoming a full‑stack infrastructure platform for robotics and physical AI, empowering them to see, understand, and act so as to power the AI‑driven fourth industrial revolution. With that, I will turn it over to Andrew for our financials and outlook.

Andrew, please go ahead.

Andrew Fan, CFO

Thank you, David. Hello everyone. The second quarter of 2026 once again demonstrated our ability to deliver solid growth at scale while investing in Hesai Gr's next chapter. As we introduced last quarter, we now manage and report our business through two segments — our core lidar business and our Strategic Growth Initiatives, or SGI — giving investors greater visibility into their distinct financial profiles and growth trajectories. With that framework in mind, let me begin with our consolidated financial performance.

Total net revenues for the quarter reached RMB 861 million, or US$127 million, representing an increase of approximately 22% year over year. The second quarter of 2026 marked our ninth consecutive quarter of year‑over‑year revenue growth. Gross margin remained healthy at 40%. On operating expenses, we remain disciplined while continuing to invest in long‑term growth. Sales and marketing expenses were RMB 15 million, general and administrative expenses were RMB 67 million, and research and development expenses were RMB 231 million.

The increase in R&D primarily reflected our targeted investments in the SGI opportunities that David discussed earlier. Even with these continued investments, we maintain solid profitability. GAAP net income reached RMB 71 million, or US$10 million, representing an increase of 60% year over year, marking our fifth consecutive quarter of GAAP profitability — demonstrating the strength of our operating model and the financial foundation built by our lidar business.

Non‑GAAP net income was RMB — or US$15 million. Now let me turn to the performance of each segment, beginning with our core lidar business. Lidar revenues reached RMB 816 million, or US$120 million. The segment generated operating profits of RMB 66 million, or US$10 million, demonstrating strong profitability and cash‑generating capacity. Total lidar shipments reached over 628,000 units, up close to 80% year over year. ADAS lidar shipments increased approximately 60% to over 485,000 units, while robotics lidar shipments grew approximately 193% to over 142,000 units.

The accelerating growth in robotics alongside the continued expansion of ADAS further demonstrates the breadth and resilience of our lidar business. Turning to SGI, the second quarter marked the segment's first revenue contribution — an important step from technology development to commercialization. SGI revenues reached RMB 45 million, or US$7 million, driven by strong early demand for our robotic actuation modules. The segment recorded an operating loss of RMB 64 million as we continue to invest in product development, commercialization, and production capacity to support the future growth of both our robotic actuation modules and Cosmo.

I am especially pleased to share that SGI commercial momentum has significantly exceeded our expectations. Our robotic actuation modules are already generating revenues, while Cosmo remains on track to begin contributing revenues in the third quarter of 2026. Given this strong momentum, we are raising our full‑year 2026 SGI revenue guidance from RMB 100 million to a range of RMB 200 to RMB 300 million. We are particularly encouraged by SGI's growth trajectory and expect the business to reach approximately US$100 million in 2027 in revenues and achieve breakeven in the same year.

This gives us increasing confidence in Hesai Gr's dual‑engine growth model. Our lidar business continues to deliver scale, profitability, and cash generation, while SGI is rapidly emerging as a powerful new growth engine. Together, they position Hesai Gr to capture the enormous opportunities ahead in robotics and physical AI. With that, this concludes our prepared remarks today. Operator, we are now ready to take questions.

OPERATOR

Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star then 1 on your telephone keypad and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star then 2. If you are on a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow‑up for the benefit of all participants on today's call. If you wish to ask your question to management in Chinese, please immediately repeat your question in English.

For the sake of clarity and order, please ask one question at a time. Management will respond, and then feel free to follow up with your next question. Our first question comes from Tina Howe with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Tina Howe, Analyst at Goldman Sachs

Hi, management. Thanks for taking my question. So my question is really regarding the actuation module. Obviously you have raised your revenue guidance for the Strategic Growth Initiatives, and also I think starting from Q2 we've seen more news regarding Sharpa's collaboration with not only NVIDIA but also Google Gemini Robot. So just wondering if you could share more details regarding these and other future potential collaborations. At the same time, what would be the long‑term revenue potential for this business?

And also, how do we achieve the strategic synergies for the partnership with Sharpa — thank you.

Dr. David Lee, CEO

Thanks for the question. This is David, I'll take this question. Look, Hesai Gr is building a full stack infrastructure platform for robotics and physical AI, empowering them to see, understand and act. And these are capabilities that take years of R&D engineering and real-world validation to build, right? Since day one, Hesai Gr's vision has always remained the same: Empower Robotics, Elevate Lives. LiDAR happened to be the first commercial product through which we demonstrated that we could build a leading technology platform and scale it globally.

But that is not the end of our journey, you see, it is just the beginning. And I myself am also a co-founder of Sharpa, a humanoid robotics company that has gained meaningful recognition globally, including recent adoptions by Gemini Robotics and Nvidia. And very soon, Sharpa is expected to begin its first real-world commercial deployment at a Dairy Queen store in Shanghai. We believe this will be the first deployment of its kind. Not a lab program, demonstration, not a pop-up showcase, but a regular operating store with the robot performing tasks autonomously in a real commercial environment.

And that means this is an important milestone, right? Because it demonstrates what humanoids can potentially achieve when they move beyond demonstrations and into a real operating environment. You know, Sharpa can serve as a valuable real-world proving ground. We already supply LiDAR to a diverse pool of robotics companies and expect to ship more than 500k units this year. Through Sharpa, we can also gain first-hand insight into what actuation systems actually need to deliver in real-world environments.

And that creates a powerful feedback loop. Hesai Gr puts its technologies onto robots. The robots in turn tell us what the market really needs, from performance metrics and form factors to reliability requirements, edge cases, duty cycles and total cost of ownership. You cannot fully capture those insights in a sky set. You get things from robots operating in the real world day after day. And even more importantly, from a company founded by the same founding team with deep first-hand understanding of both the technology and the end application.

Let me give you a few concrete examples of this. For a humanoid, LiDAR is typically more about resolution, field of view, compactness and robustness than simply maximizing the testing range. You know what I mean? And for actuation, the requirements go well beyond paper specification. Reliability, thermal performance, consistency, durability and performance under real load all matter. These are the kinds of requirements that become much clearer when you are building and operating the robot yourself.

And that is the difference between being a component supplier and being a supplier with first-hand knowledge of how the end product actually works in the real world. Our supply of products and provision of manufacturing services to Sharpa act as a high-signal testbed and learning platform before bringing our products to the broader market. As disclosed in the announcement and circular for the continuing connected transactions with Sharpa, we are seeking to increase the annual cap under the Supply of Products Framework Agreement with Sharpa from RMB 100 million to RMB 300 million, subject to shareholders' approval at the EGM, with the majority of this year's transactions expected to be in actuation modules. Longer term, the opportunity is much broader than Sharpa. Our products are all designed to serve third-party customers at scale. If physical AI is entering a period of rapid adoption, Hesai Gr's role is to provide the foundational infrastructure, effectively selling the shovels in the physical AI gold rush. Sharpa, you see, gives us a way to sharpen those tools faster, validate them in the real world and understand what the market will need next.

That is the strategic value of the flywheel. Sharpa is the proving ground while the broader physical AI market is the opportunity. That's my answer to your question. Thank you.

OPERATOR

Our next question comes from Tim Hisao with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Tim Hisao, Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Hi, this is Tim from Morgan Stanley. Thanks for taking my questions and congratulations on this exciting new chapter as management just mentioned. So just a quick question about the actuation modules. Could you please give us more colors on Hesai Gr's humanoid robot actuation modules and how they fit into a broader robotic strategy? And what kind of financial profiles do you expect these products to have over time? And are you currently shipping those products to customers beyond Sharpa?

Those are my questions. Thank you.

Dr. David Lee, CEO

Thank you. This is David. Okay, three questions really. Do we want to do it? Is the market ready to do it and can we do it? Well, want it easy? Yes. You know, actuation can be more than half a robot's BOM. One humanoid may need over 100 modules. Run that math and long-term demand approaches a trillion units. A trillion. And the margin profile is currently around 40%. That's the market we want, right. The second question. Ready? Yes. Humanoids are hitting volume and real-world deployment starting this year.

Every robotics company is hunting for great joints, but they're hard to find. You know, a lot of suppliers don't have first-hand knowledge of what leading robot makers need or why those metrics matter. Joints are both critical and hard. Power, precision, size and durability all at once. Like asking a pro athlete to run a marathon every day. The third question, can we.

OPERATOR

The next question comes from Jeff Chung with Citi. Please go ahead.

Jeff Chung, Analyst at Citi

Hi. Thank you, operator. Hi, David. Andrew and Yuen Qing, congratulate the excellent result. My question is about the SGI. What drove the increase in SGI revenue guidance previously set? And how should we think about the revenue mix between robotic actuation modules and the Cosmo in SGI? Thank you very much.

Dr. David Lee, CEO

Okay. I know a lot of our investors care about this. We actually raised full-year 2026 SGI revenue guidance from Renminbi 100 million to a range of Renminbi 200 to 300 million for 2027. We are now looking at roughly US$100 million, about Renminbi 700 million. And most excitingly, SGI is expected to reach break-even in 2027. This is because commercial demand and the speed of tech validation came in well ahead of what we originally modeled. That's also a strong signal.

Hesai Gr is evolving into an infrastructure platform for robotics and physical AI, not just a LiDAR company. The main SGI driver this year is robotic automation actuation. Built on more than a decade of engineering experiences, these products matured fast and started generating revenue in Q2. Demand from Sharpa has been a major source of our revenue for robotic actuation. Sharpa produced one of the first humanoids, maybe the first, actually deploying into real restaurants with a path to scale.

That demand for our actuation products ran ahead of expectations, which is why we raised the annual cap for the continuing connected transactions under the Supply of Products Framework Agreement with Sharpa from Renminbi 100 million to Renminbi 300 million. A quick clarification that Renminbi 300 million is the maximum amount for the transactions with Sharpa under the Supply of Products Framework Agreement, subject to shareholders' approval at the forthcoming EGM.

Cosmo, our spatial intelligence platform, is the other SGI pillar, and it's moving fast too. Prototypes shipping in July; initial orders came within seven days. It's well on track to start contributing revenue in Q3. We are not breaking out any exact revenue split between these two at this early stage. Directionally, actuation is expected to be the majority of SGI revenue in 2026. Cosmo's initial contribution this year will be smaller, low 8 digits of revenue, because commercialization starts later this year and the higher value cloud services compound with deployment scale over time.

That revenue mix between the two pillars should look different in 2027. As Cosmo matures from the AI spatial camera into cloud processing, subscription and licensing of high-quality 3D spatial assets, its contribution should raise meaningfully. More importantly, a growing share of Cosmo's revenue is expected to be recurring cloud services under the business model we described earlier at structurally higher margins as expected. So the raised SGI guidance is really about actuation commercialization faster than expected this year and next, with Cosmo set up to become another meaningful contributor as the platform scales.

OPERATOR

The next question comes from Nora Min with UBS. Please go ahead.

Nora Min, Analyst at UBS

Hi, this is Nora from UBS. Thank you for taking my question. I have a quick question on Cosmo. Can you brief us the business model of Cosmo, its existing and potential customers? And lastly, the delivery schedule of Cosmo. Thank you.

Dr. David Lee, CEO

Thank you. This is David. I apologize, there's like some errors about muting different lines on the operator side. Can you hear me okay?

Nora Min, Analyst at UBS

Yes, I can, David.

Dr. David Lee, CEO

Good, good, good, good, good. Thank you. Yeah. Well, I guess this is a part that we still need to work on the AI or the training data to make sure it's not part of the reinforcement learning experiment. Okay, so Cosmo is actually a super exciting product. We previewed the Cosmo in April and more than 200 prospective partners have reached out. Robotics, film, gaming, tourism, luxury, and more. It keeps extending, and the breadth is a signal that this isn't a niche gadget for one vertical.

Think about what the 2D camera became over decades: the infrastructure of how the world gets captured and consumed. Cosmo is that, except this time it's 3D and AI-driven anywhere a regular camera works. Today there is a much bigger opportunity digitizing the physical world in 3D. I prefer not to put out a specific TAV or order value for a customer right now at this early stage because we simply don't know how big this could be, and a lot of customers are still in prototype testing and pilots.

What matters to me is who is buying into this, who is testing hard, and who is already ordering, and how fast that moves. We started shipping prototypes in July. Within seven days of the first deliveries, we got strong feedback and locked in initial orders. That is the real pace. Early demand is clustering in two key areas as we see. The first one is the part we're super familiar with: the robotics. It's a sharper near-term pull because humanoids are hitting early mass production this year and they are hungry for high-quality training input to unlock scaling.

The ceiling today still seems real. A robot can look flawless in simulation and fall apart the second it walks into a real factory or home. Training on weak spatial data is like getting a blurry textbook. Reading it 100 times doesn't raise the ceiling. Cosmo turns real environments into high-fidelity, physically grounded 3D assets. Richer training set, better real performance. Less risk of model collapse from synthetic-only data. The second one is more interesting.

It's actually the media digital content we're talking about: gaming, film, luxury, tourism, AI, short-form advertising, etc. Content has been stuck in 2D for decades. It needs a dimensional upgrade. These applications share the same goal: to make the physical world immersive and reusable. A store, a set, a concert, a historical site stops being a one-off shoot and becomes a 3D spatial asset that's reusable. You're not photographing the world; you're turning it into a new class of content.

Film production is the clearest example. Traditional pipelines—green screens and cleared practical shoots—are expensive, inconsistent, and slow. Cosmo changes that equation: higher quality, higher consistency, and lower cost. I can't name who we are in close talk with yet, but they are household names globally. Cosmo is a spatial intelligence platform: AI, spatial camera, algorithms, 3D assets, and cloud services. One system. The device is just the front door.

The real value compounds behind it. More devices mean more inputs. That deepens the asset library, unlocks more applications, pulls in more customers, and drives recurring revenue through cloud usage and asset licensing. That's where the operating leverage shows up so early. Commercial traction is real. Orders and prototypes are just the first turn of the wheel. Recent feedback has already validated both our technology and the business blueprint.

We are very excited about the next batch of orders coming through. Thank you.

OPERATOR

Our next question comes from Dan Lynn Wren with CICC. Please go ahead.

Dan Lynn Wren, Analyst at CICC

Hi, management. Elizabeth Daniel from CICC. Thank you for taking my question and congratulations on the strong results and impressive STI. My question is about your guidance. Could you please update us on your guidance for both the third quarter and full year 2026? Are there any updates to your 3.5 million units LiDAR shipment guidance for this year? Thank you.

Dr. David Lee, CEO

Thanks for the question. For Q3, we expect total revenue of Renminbi between 1.1 to 1.15 billion, with LiDAR shipments around 800,000 to 850,000 units. SGI should be high 8 digits of that revenue in Q3. Actuation is ramping fast and is approaching 10,000 modules of monthly production capacity soon. Most excitingly, Q3 is expected to be the quarter where revenue from outside ADAS LiDAR gets close to or even more than half of total revenue. That's another clear step into our role as infrastructure for robotics and physical AI.

That acceleration also reinforces our confidence for the full year. We have raised the SGI expectations, but LiDAR remains the core. We are reiterating 2026 shipments guidance of 3 to 3.5 million LiDAR units. We shipped about 1.1 million units in the first half, almost double last year. And here is what people sometimes miss. Our ADAS business follows auto seasonality. Second half is usually much stronger. Stronger. Last year, roughly two-thirds of our full-year volume came in second half.

So this second-half ramp is normal for our business. And on top of that, there are three things driving LiDAR growth. First, penetration. LiDAR is not just a story for the new EV players anymore. Traditional OEMs like Geely and Changan—they are putting more LiDAR into their EV architectures too. LiDAR penetration on EVs was close to 20% in 2025. We think it could get to roughly 30% to 40% this year. And we've been number one in China's long-range ADAS LiDAR markets for 17 months straight, according to Gasgoo.

So bigger market, strong position. We like that setup. Second, don't think of penetration as capped at 100%. It can go well beyond 100% because it's no longer one LiDAR per car. China's mandatory L3 and L4 safety standards came out in August and should take effect in July 2027. Automakers can't wait until then and start drilling holes in the car to add LiDAR. These sensors have to be designed in and integrated at the factory. That's why we are already seeing multiple LiDAR setups for broader coverage and also more safety redundancy.

Remember how we've always described LiDAR like airbags? You don't just want one airbag in a car. And we've already secured multi-LiDAR design wins with Li Auto, Xiaomi, and Changan with three to six LiDARs per car. And I don't think this stops at L3. Over time we are also seeing advanced L2 picking up blind-spot LiDARs. So multi-LiDAR—this is becoming a major trend in 2026. And once people experience a safer, more capable driving system, it's very hard to go backwards.

Third, robotics. Humanoids, lawnmowers, robo vans, robo taxi. Demand is picking up across the board. Embodied AI is especially interesting. We are already working with more than 50 leading companies in this space, including Unitree. Morgan Stanley estimated that the robot LiDAR TAM could be six times the size of cars. Personally, I think it can be even larger, because any robot moving through the real world needs to know where it is, what's around it, and what's changing around it, especially when it's interacting with people all the time.

LiDAR is becoming a basic sense organ for robots, the way eyes are for humans. So put it together. The core LiDAR business can keep compounding and, frankly, remain our cash cow, while SGI is the new growth driver that's already taking off. Okay, hope this answers your question.

OPERATOR

Our next question comes from Xiao Lu with BOCI. Please go ahead.

Xiao Lu, Analyst at BOCI

Hello, management, this is Lujia from BOCI. My question is regarding robotics LiDAR. Any upside or downside risk to our robotics LiDAR shipment guidance for 2026? In terms of downstream market, beyond lawnmowers, robo van and two-wheelers, where is the penetration accelerating? And does the FCC's recent action on foreign-produced robotics devices affect our robotics business? Thank you.

Dr. David Lee, CEO

Okay, we are still expecting the full-year outlook for our robotics LiDAR over 500,000. Last year it was around 240,000. We are on track for the delivery. Q2 robotics LiDAR shipments almost tripled year over year. Demand is broad, not concentrated in one niche. On the FCC piece, we don't see a material direct impact at this point. Most of our robotics LiDAR volume this year is robotic lawnmowers. Those customers are largely Chinese manufacturers focused on Europe as their key overseas market.

U.S. lawnmower penetration is still relatively low. We are watching the rules closely and will stay fully compliant. But as of today, it doesn't change our shipment outlook. More importantly, lawnmowers are just one wedge of a much bigger opportunity. The core view is simple: any robot moving through the physical world has to do what humans do—see, understand, and act in real time. LiDAR is becoming a fundamental sense organ for robots. A robot without reliable 3D perception is like walking through an unfamiliar room with your eyes closed.

We already hold leading position across humanoids and quadrupeds, robo taxi, robo vans, and robotic lawnmowers per GGII and Frost & Sullivan. Humanoid demand is especially strong. We are working with more than 50 embodied AI companies worldwide, including Unitree. JT128 is quickly becoming a go-to LiDAR for humanoids and quadrupeds—navigation, obstacle avoidance, safe interactions with people and objects. Warehouses and logistics are moving fast too.

In some high-performance setups, a single machine can carry as many as 15 JT128 units for full coverage. JT128 also carries a higher ASP than the JT16 used in lawnmowers. Harder performance requirements, more LiDAR content per machine. So robotic LiDAR isn't just an add-on to auto. Over time it can get substantially larger—more environments, potentially far more machines. We like to say LiDAR is the shovel in the physical AI gold rush. We don't need to call which category scales first—humanoids, warehouse robots, robo taxi, lawnmowers, or something else.

Whichever wins, reliable spatial perception is essential. Hesai Gr is set up to ride that growth across the whole ecosystem.

OPERATOR

Peter, we can take the next question. Your next question comes from Jessie Low with Bank of America Securities. Please go ahead.

Jessie Low, Analyst at Bank of America Securities

Hi David, I'm Zhu Yuan Ting. This is Jesse from Bank of America. Thank you for taking my question. I just have a quick one around our key customer Xiaomi. Xiaomi has included Robosense to its LiDAR supplier on the latest model launch. So how do you see Leslie's share developing in Xiaomi's future models, and more broadly, as more suppliers enter into our customer supply chain, how do you expect the competition, pricing pressure, and also the supplier shares to evolve?

Dr. David Lee, CEO

Okay, first, Xiaomi moving further into multi LiDAR is actually encouraging for the industry. Even on L2 they are adding a rear LiDAR where there used to be zero. That tells you something. Automakers and consumers are recognizing what LiDAR is worth. Our long-term view hasn't changed. Every intelligent vehicle eventually carries at least one LiDAR. Many will carry several for coverage and redundancy. So it isn't a fight over one LiDAR per car. As LiDARs per vehicle rise, the opportunity can become several times larger.

The pie itself is turning out to be much, much bigger than people thought. On competition, market sourcing is normal in the auto industry, especially as programs scale. We don't comment on allocation for individual future models. That may shift sometimes with pull, performance, cost, capacity and platform needs. Better to let the data speak. According to Gasco, Hesai Gr has been number one in China's long-range ADAS LiDAR market for 17 straight months with roughly 40 to 50% share, and we've done that while keeping relatively healthy pricing and margins.

As a leader, our goal isn't 100% share at any cost. A destructive price war is the worst outcome for everyone. It starves technology, quality and safety. We'd rather stay clearly ahead on tech, deliver more value to customers and earn a fair return on that value. That confidence comes from structural advantages: proprietary ASICs, deep system engineering, large-scale automated manufacturing, a broad product portfolio, automotive-grade reliability and years of mass production.

Those let us stay competitive even when we are not the cheapest option. Customers aren't buying a cute little box on the roof. They are buying safety and reliability. For the moment that camera fails in your cars, LiDAR is the airbag, as we've always said. We are also investing in the next cycle. Picasso, our full color, ultra-sensitive 60D spat SOC integrates depth and RGB color at the chip level. To the best of our knowledge, Hesai Gr is currently the only company in China taking native chip-level full color LiDAR into mass production on track for the second half of 2026.

That's the kind of innovation that lets us compete on more than price. Over time, the LiDAR versus camera debate fades. They become one integrated system. The only question that remains is when the car drives itself: is my family safe enough? People also obsess over shipments or revenue share but miss profit share. Just look at Apple in smartphones. Its share of industry profits has been far higher than its share of unit shipments. That wasn't the price war; it was technology, product, brand and a differentiated value. We think about Hesai Gr the same way. We'll keep working to hold our leading position, like 40–50-ish. But leadership isn't just shipping the most units. It's capturing a leading share of the industry economic value, protecting healthy gross margins, reinvesting in innovation and creating long-term values for users and for society.

OPERATOR

Our next question comes from Erin Wang with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Erin Wang, Analyst at Jefferies

Hi David, Andrew and Yuanqing. This is Aaron from Jefferies. Thanks for taking my question. My question is on the LiDAR ASP and margin side. Given the ongoing industry-wide pricing pressure and also the competition from peers, could management elaborate more on the ASP trend for LiDAR products over the next few quarters? And also how should we think about our margin profile going forward?

Andrew Fan, CFO

Thanks. Okay, we are positive on the resilience of gross margin. Full-year 2026 outlook is unchanged, close to 40%, and we expect to keep a healthy margin profile going forward. First, look past the headline blended ASP. The L3 shift changed the mass from one LiDAR's price to total LiDAR content per vehicle. An L2 car typically carried one large long-range LiDAR. Now we are already seeing L2 add a rear blind spot unit—two LiDARs. Entry-level L3 might be 1 ATX plus 2 FTX blind-spotting LiDARs.

More advanced setups with ETX and actual FTX can push total content to roughly US$500 to $1,000 per vehicle. So the LiDAR value we deliver per car is rising, and that's showing up in vehicles launching this year. Gross margin isn't just about price. It's price minus cost. Our price: we've already number one in the market share, so we have no interest in giving up pricing just to chase more share. We compete on brand, technology and quality. On cost: years of in-house ASICs, system-level integration, automation and scale have let us keep bringing costs down.

Net of that, we target a relatively stable ADAS margin profile. The mix helps the group too. Robotics LiDAR and overseas business generally run higher margins than domestic. ADAS robotics LiDARs almost tripled year over year in Q2, and the global business should keep expanding. As those scale, they remain important supports for healthy group margins. SGI also started contributing revenue in Q2. Too early to comment on near-term financials while products are still ramping, but long term we expect SGI margins about 40%.

Cosmo, especially with cloud services in the mix, should carry a structurally higher margin than pure hardware and become increasingly accretive to the group.

OPERATOR

There are no further phone questions at this time. I'll now hand the call back over to Yong Ting Shi for closing remarks.

Yong Ting Shi, Head of Capital Markets

Thank you once again for joining us today. If you have further questions, please feel free to contact our IR team. This concludes today's call and we look forward to speaking to you again next quarter. Thank you and goodbye.

OPERATOR

That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

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